Identity for the Nigerians the internet misses.
Roughly 40 million adults sit outside the formal financial system. Building a smartphone-only identity product would leave most of them exactly where they are.
Four ways in. Every one of them finishes.
Equity means treating everyone consistently while recognising that people do not all start from the same place. So there is no single front door — there are four, and they issue the same credential.
Self-serve online
Verify in minutes from any smartphone or browser, using a document you already hold.
This is the cheapest path to run and the fastest to finish, so it carries the people it can carry. It is the default — not the only option — because designing for it alone is what excludes everyone else.
USSD & feature phone
No data, no app, no problem. Register and share your credential with a short code from any handset.
Feature phones remain common outside major cities, and a data plan is a recurring cost even where coverage exists. A short code works on the handset someone already owns, with no download and no airtime spent on data.
Assisted video review
When a document is damaged, stale, or mismatched, a trained reviewer completes verification with you — in your language.
Automated checks fail on the documents real life produces: a laminated card that has faded, a name spelled differently across two IDs, a slip printed years ago. A machine rejection should route to a person, not to a dead end.
In person, near you
Verify face to face through bank branches, agent networks, and enrolment centres for those who cannot or would rather not go online.
Some people have no phone of their own, and some would simply rather be walked through it by someone in the room. Using agent networks and branches that already exist keeps the nearest access point from being in another state.
The barriers are specific, so the answers are too.
None of these are edge cases. Each one is a reason a verification flow built for one kind of user quietly fails for a large number of Nigerians.
No smartphone
Feature phones remain common outside major cities. Our USSD flow covers registration, sharing, and transfers with no app and no data.
No reliable data
Where connectivity is intermittent, verification resumes rather than restarting, and offline QR presentation works without a live connection.
Imperfect documents
Damaged, expired, or name-mismatched documents get assisted review instead of a rejection screen.
Language
Interfaces and assisted review in English, Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo, so the flow does not assume fluency in one language.
Low digital confidence
Agent-assisted enrolment for people who would rather have a person walk them through it than a screen.
Distance
Verification through existing agent networks and branches, so the nearest access point is not in another state.
Rules we hold ourselves to, not aspirations.
These constrain what we are allowed to ship. If a feature cannot satisfy them, it is not finished.
- Verification is free for individuals, permanently
- Every capability available in the app has a non-smartphone path
- Assisted review by a trained human for any document a machine rejects
- No verification path that requires a bank account to begin
Roughly 40 million Nigerian adults sit outside the formal financial system — many not for want of income, but for want of provable identity in a form an institution will accept.
That figure is Nigeria market context, not a TrueID metric. We have no adoption numbers to report yet. What we can state is the design consequence: a smartphone-only product would leave most of those adults exactly where they are, which is why the non-smartphone paths are built first-class rather than promised later.
Verification is free for individuals, permanently. Partners pay per check, so cost scales with use instead of gatekeeping access.
Identity should reach everyone, not just the connected.
Start with the path that fits the phone in your hand — or the branch down the road.